Winterking (1987)
Page 29
his eyes. It was odd, she thought, to think of him that way,
not eyes black as the darkness but the darkness as black as his
eyes. But she knew it was fitting.
The women in the library had been kind. They had tried
to be comforting; yet, she had seen the disdain in their faces.
Poor nasty fat thing, they had said, without speaking a word.
Poor thing, they had whispered, watching her waddle between the rows of books, lugging the life about with her like something in a sack.
“In the new world,” Carolyn told the old man, “they will
always be thin.” She kept hold of her smile, partially out of
bitterness but as well from embarrassment. It was much the
same smile that had lingered in Wykeham’s mind when on
the night he was leaving he had written her his last letter.
“How can I explain?” he had written, saying the words a
second time, to himself.
“And when they bear,” Carolyn went on softly, “the child
becomes as the woman, the one repeating the other. Without
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pain.” She looked at the old man carefully and said, “So they
have explained it to me. But I will never know for certain.
Not with a life already inside me. Because of it, when the
time comes, 1 shall not be permitted to cross.”
She settled farther back in the seat. The darkness had not
changed but now in the blackness of the river she could make
out a succession of shadows. Moment to moment, they
seemed to resemble a tree, a galloping stallion, a ship. She
folded her hands on her stomach.
“Sometimes I am afraid,” she whispered, wanting none
but the old man to hear. “Suppose,” she said, “it is something
fit only for circuses." She pressed her plain fingers into the
lap of her dress. “Something for Barnum, with stubs of wings
or too many legs.”
She discovered the old man watching her. Its chest
moved.
“It’s done in darkness,” it croaked.
“Loaded in darkness,” it insisted, its breath a dry hiss.
Not understanding, Carolyn merely continued to stare.
The corpse set its teeth. “Life,” it said sharply. The body
felt heavy and terribly cold. It had been dead only a few
hours. But in fifty years, Willa knew, she had not learned to
be ready.
“You can’t see,” the corpse said, her voice in its voice, its
cold breath touching her own dead heart with awe. “You can’t
ever see. You must simply wait.”
An army, the stationmaster thought in his sleep, listening to the tramp of feet on the platform. He had been no more than a boy during the Great War; but the trains, coming
down from the north, had passed through quite often. Now
and again, because of delays on the line, the troop cars had
stopped at the village. The men, spilling onto the street, had
had time for a smoke or, if they were daring, just time
enough to run the quarter mile across to the Royal Charles—
though, of course, it had been the Royal Edward then.
The night breeze blew stiffly through the office window,
stirring the stationmaster’s memory. It was the same sound,
he decided without waking. Though, in truth, it wasn’t the
rumble of boots he heard but the shared sense of purpose and
hurry that was missing from the scramble of ordinary passengers. The sound was continuous and, for the space of several
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minutes, deafening. Yet by the time he had struggled out of
his sleep, it was gone. He stuck his head out into the cold
night air.
Except for the very pregnant young woman leading an
old man across to the stairs, the platform was empty. He
watched them go down slowly into the street. He looked at
his watch. It was not quite two-thirty. The train, he decided,
was late.
“I am slowing you,” the corpse said. It was not an
apology.
Carolyn was silent. She did not say that her own careful
slowness was as much a matter of her sickness and pain. Left
alone she would never have been able to keep pace with the
scurrying feet of the women.
Far ahead the last had already vanished under the trees.
A ridge of cloud was creeping up from the south and it had
become very dark. Had it not been for the birds screeching
about the entrance to the path, she would have missed it
entirely. Carolyn’s eyes flickered up at the branches. She was
frightened.
“There are Indians,” she whispered.
“I have seen them.”
“Perhaps you should not,” she said pointedly. She kept
looking over her shoulder.
It was the first time in her life she had stirred from New
Awanux, the first time, apart from Wykeham, she had dared
much of anything. But it had done no good. In the damp chill
of the wood she saw nothing that had any meaning, only
half-things that were constantly changing. She walked more
painfully. For a moment even the lame old man was in danger
of drawing ahead of her.
The air smelled different. They were among the stones.
She could feel their vague huge shapes looming over her.
“It is strange to think,” she said, “that it is all a mistake.”
She stopped and rubbed her hands on her dress. With the
back of her wrist she pushed her hair away from her eyes.
“We will come to water soon,” she said. "There he who
will carry them across will be waiting.”
Her hands which had been seeking something to hold,
something to touch, fell helplessly.
“Someone has blundered,” she said.
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The old man looked blank.
"A Redd Man,” she whispered. “Can’t you see that? The
fetcher, the stalker by streams.”
She peered desperately into the eyes of the corpse.
“Red as the old cock salmon,” she whispered, “red as
blood.”
Her hands, which at last found some purpose, now hid
her face.
“A Redd Man,” she cried out, a sob breaking through the
mask of her fingers. “A Redd Man,” she wailed. “Never
Indians.”
5.
Deep into the evening a tender little breeze moved through
the hedge. It stirred the tall curtains, shaking, ever so
faintly, the cloak which hung by the hearth.
The Reverend Timothy Longford watched the rotted old
fabric as though transfixed. The firelight had touched its veins
of gold with a bright rime of flame, its threads of fine silver
with radiance. He tried to moisten his lips.
"D ear Christ,” he whispered.
In his mind the flickering vision of God and His angels
still lingered. He felt a mortifying guilt. For twenty years, as
rich and as holy a mystery, the woman, forsaking all others,
had clung to him. In sickness and in health, he said, not
aloud, but his lips moved reciting the service. He looked
again at the cloak. How could he have been so mistaken?
“Dear sweet Christ,” he repeated. But it was the woman
who was gone.
At the table the discussion went around him.
The Duke refolded the paper. Returning it to his pocket,
he became aware of a swift flutter of pain. Still, it was no
more than a gentle pressure on his chest, and he hunched his
thick shoulders, ignoring it.
“You wrote me a letter from Egypt once,” he said. “I was
at the bank, William, when I opened it, in the chair I was to
give to Houseman.”
Wykeham was looking away.
“Thirteen years ago,” the Duke reminded him. “It was
about women. Their bowing and nodding, you wrote, reminded
you of birds.”
His Grace shook his head.
“I would have thought they would have been herons,”
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he said. “Or whatever white birds there are in Egypt. They
were blonde after all. They were English women.”
He waited and 'then cleared his throat. “But they were
like crows, you said. Their eyes soulless like the eyes of
crows.”
“Not crows,” Hunt offered ruefully.
With two large hands Hunt hitched up his trousers; with
another he took up his cup and looked over it. “But all the
same,” he said, “like a flight of birds turning.” His old red
face glowered. “One creature,” he said, “thinking one thought
and turning—
“But where?” Longford asked desperately.
Holmes was not listening. He was watching Hunt’s arms.
Yet, until he struck the match and saw the bright flame
twisting above the bowl of the pipe, he had not remembered
the photograph.
At once his head tilted up.
“What if,” he asked, surprised, “from the very beginning
we have had it wrong?”
It was only then that Wykeham looked at him.
“What then?” he asked.
“Suppose there were two Creations.”
Wykeham frowned.
“Or twenty,” Holmes said.
“Or hundreds,” Harwood added disagreeably. It was the
first time in a long while he had spoken. “Like beads on a
string,” he said, his voice too loud because he thought they
were ignoring him.
“Only here, I think,” Holmes said quietly. He was
concentrating. “Only sharing this place,” he said softly. “Only
using this place and, though struggling, never able to get free
of it.”
There were endless worlds.
In this one there was water.
Carl Brelling edged to within a few feet of it.
He had tried to move carefully, avoiding the mounds of
dead sticks and the briars, but scrambling over the maze of
bleak walls in the heart of the wood he had fallen. Although
he had managed not to cry out, his elbows were bruised and
his trousers in shreds. But because he was sober he began to
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feel the cold. He stood in the reedy grass at the water’s edge,
cursing the darkness and shivering.
It was like coming to the end of the world.
It was just that, he thought, the world’s end. The shame
was he was alone at it.
The woman who had marched into the shop and whom,
half in a daze, he had followed, was gone. She had driven
him, he thought, along the river. He remembered the car at
least. He had got into the corner of the back seat and had
paid no attention while she had gone on about Nora and the
young man. It was not that he was uninterested; he could no
longer make out the meaning of the simplest words.
What was love? he wondered.
What, damn them, were women?
He did not pretend these were original questions but,
despairing of answers, he dug his small boots into the dirt of
the bank. The night wind had come and chilled him. It had
been hours, he thought. Perhaps longer.
For a long time he had looked out the car window.
At the beginning, on the plain, the fires had been everywhere. Like the swift streak of a line-squall fires exploded over the roofs of New Awanux. They erupted from chimneys
and doorways, fell hissing out of the low sky. He sat and
stared without speaking.
Bristol, when they came to it, was already in ruins. The
flames formed a ring halfway across the horizon.
The woman peered out through the windscreen.
“It is still dark up ahead,” she said gravely.
The houses of the village had come up on the left. All at
once at the crown of the hill there were women. The street
and the sidewalks had been filled with them. By hundreds,
they tramped through the bare gardens and over the lawns.
The headmistress stopped the car at the top of the green
and climbed out.
“Where are you going?” he asked, but she moved away
with the others. When he opened the door of the car, no one
stopped to look back.
His poor eyes squinted into the darkness.
On the side of the green there was a garage, its doors
closed and its dark windows shuttered. The field beside it
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was wild and overgrown. Unmindful, the women poured into
it. At a distance he watched them.
The path they made twisted; it wound among the rough
stands of burdock and thistle. Conscious only that he had
been left behind, Carl Brelling started after them. He went
toward the far edge where the ground fell steeply. He ran.
Inside his chest he was suffocating. Just once, out of the
corner of his eye, he still saw them. But as the trees at the
margin of the wood came up at him, he stopped, gasping,
dragging the cold air back into his lungs and found only their
clothing.
He closed his eyes tightly. But it was not the nakedness
of the women he was imagining but the hallway in his
mother’s house, long ago in New Awanux. He had been the
youngest, a boy in a house of women. His big, grown-up
sister had left her stockings curled at the foot of the stairs,
her skirts on the railing.
Trudging up to the landing, catching up one thing then
another as she went, his mother had thrown each one back to
him. The mound of his sister’s clothing had grown in his
arms.
“She has no sense of decency,” his mother said. She
stopped outside Willa’s room and glared in.
“And this is the way you treat m e," his mother said
bitterly to the girl on the bed.
He had peered around his mother’s waist.
“Like a servant,” his mother said.
Frightened, he had pressed his face into the loose jumble of garments. But the smell of them, damp and faintly sour, rising like a guilty transmission, cut through him.
Willa’s long bare legs dropped to the floor. She had not
looked at him, perhaps had not even known he was there. But
he fled.
At the head of the stairs where the light poured in
through the window he tripped over a pair of worn pumps,
which, after her slip, were the last things she had abandoned.
Carl Brelling had scarcely taken a half dozen st
eps when
the sensation of water brought him back to himself.
The light began on the far bank. At first it seemed no
more than a small ragged tear. But in a moment it was several
yards wide. He stood and stared, praying that it would stop.
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Instead the light grew. Presently, in its brightness, he could
see the many shapes of their arms, the endless variation of
their breasts and their legs.
A thousand women were crossing the clearing, on their
way up the great, fissured slope of a hill. Not a hill exactly. It
kept rising, and a hill, he was certain, would not. He drew
his hand to his brow, shielding his eyes from the light.
Far up, above the highest tops of the water oaks, he saw
the first branches. They were distinguishable only because
his eyes were still fixed on them. But as long as he looked
they were everywhere— straining outward with immense sweeping arms. The wind stirred them and was itself stirred, was filled with fluttering leaves. He forced his head higher.
It was in that instant he saw her, saw only her.
“Nora!” he called.
The harsh slit of her mouth opened. It vomited flame.
Turning frantically, Carl Brelling bumped into a man.
He tried to run, but the man had got hold of him.
Ducking, scrambling on hands and knees, he tried to
crawl. Suddenly there was another in his way. Reaching out
when already he knew he should have stopped, he felt the
prickly wool of her dress. The distended sack of her belly
jutted over him.
The woman stared down at him in horror. He was not
old and he was thrusting his small wet hands in her dress.
“Get away from me!” she screamed.
Whatever was there in truth was perhaps no great
matter. The eyes Willa looked through saw the face clearly.
She remembered his lies. She had taken her own life to be
with him.
The corpse shivered. It’s tongue went stiff in its mouth.
"You were not dead!” it cried. “You were never— ”
It was not a man’s voice, or a woman's. But it was old
and terrible and made desperate by longing.
Carl Brelling turned his head.
The arms grasped him tightly and twisted. At that same
moment something came loose in his memory. The name